Two-minute drill on transportation

The latest round of mayoral candidate videos from ABC 13 deal with transportation, where the four contenders each chose a location that embodied how they intended to deal with Houston’s traffic issues.

City Councilman Peter Brown chose METRO headquarters, because “we need to be getting better results from METRO,” Harris County Board of Education Trustee Roy Morales chose Richmond Avenue, former City Attorney Gene Locke chose “one of the busiest intersections in Texas” at Interstate 10 West and the Loop 610 and I can’t tell where City Controller Annise Parker is (would be much obliged to astute readers who point it out).

Each of them touted their transportation ideas and Locke timed the video with the release of his transportation policy paper.

In his “C.H.O.I.C.E.S. for Transportation” plan (which stands for “Connecting Houstonians On Issues Concerning Effective Solutions

for Transportation”), Locke calls for a “Mobile Houston” Web site that will incorporate traffic with infrastructure project information, a new city “Department of Mobility,” a revamped bus system, including lower fares, coordinated traffic lights, more light rail and commuter rail, better bike routes and more transit-oriented development.

The plan is fairly detailed, although as with every other policy topic, it does not greatly distinguish Locke from the proposals of rivals Parker and Brown.

The similarities in policy among the major candidates sort of remind me of this story I heard about a professor who used horoscopes as a thought experiment in class. Every student was to read a horoscope and raise his or her hand if they thought the blurb applied to their life. Many hands went up. Then, the student was to pass the blurb to the student sitting beside him. The same question was posed, and always just about as many raised their hands, which of course showed that horoscopes were always vague and evergreen enough to apply to anyone.

As you read the policy proposals on campaign Web sites, ask yourself if it would make any difference whether the name at the top of the white paper were changed. Or, to put it another way, if we removed the names from the top of the papers, would you have any idea who they came from?